The Idol of Authenticity
Working in digital communications and social media, I talk about authenticity a lot. If you’ve been on social media at all recently, you might have an idea as to why. You’ll likely have stumbled across the term authenticity more than once, in Twitter bios and discussed in Tik Tok videos, or seen its influence in platforms like ‘BeReal’ and the masterfully “uncurated” #photodumps. A quick Google search will give you endless articles about how necessary authenticity is when marketing college to the infamously skeptical Generation Z. In fact, I’ll be presenting with a colleague at a conference this fall about the value of creating a student marketing team to help achieve the kind of authentic content that prospective students crave. Authenticity is a word, a value, a social phenomena that follows me throughout the day, and leaves me with lingering questions. Should this really be our highest value? From a surface level, sure, why not.
There’s something deeply comforting about society’s obsession with authenticity. Authenticity demands that we drop all pretense and simply be ourselves. Come as you are, exactly who you are. Authenticity, as we think of it, seems intrinsically linked to our understanding of individuality. Through authenticity, we know who we are, we know what we need, and we can share that with the world. We can prioritize who we are, and what we need to take care of ourselves. It celebrates who we are as unique individuals, no need to transform to align with someone else’s ideals or standards. Why be someone else, when you can be you. It’s an empowered reaction to the unattainable and heavily doctored online worlds of influencers and celebrities, a pushback on FOMO energy. Why live someone else’s life, when you can live yours. I’m all for this. At the same time, there’s something about this fascination with authenticity that bothers me.
This love of authenticity leaves me asking what do we really mean by the term? When we claim to push our authentic selves, who, exactly, are we putting forward? Should authenticity truly be our highest value? On the one hand, none of this is a bad thing. In fact, it seems like only a good thing. It’s when we push this value to the extremes that the cracks begin to appear, like if we speak our truth without concern for others, or do what we want over what others want, because we are being our ‘authentic self.’ What happens when our need to be ‘ourselves’ comes into conflict with the needs of people we care about?
Our desire for individuality is nothing new. In fact writer Ralph Waldo Emerson made the argument that should he not be himself, he would be lying. “This is to be done in our smooth times by speaking the truth. Check this lying hospitality and lying affection. Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse,” he writes. He argues that should even his wife’s needs or desires come into conflict with his own, his own must take dominance, if he were to be true to himself. To his credit, he thinks that she should due the same:
“I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I will love you; if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own. I do this not selfishly, but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest, and mine, and all men's however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth. Does this sound harsh to-day? You will soon love what is dictated by your nature as well as mine, and, if we follow the truth, it will bring us out safe at last. But so may you give these friends pain.”
Reading this quote of Emerson’s makes me question how he managed to be married at all. All healthy relationships, especially marriage, have a mutual understanding that sometime we will need different things, and need to prioritize the other, something that Emerson clearly disagreed with. In this selflessness, we find that we become our better selves. We learned that we can change, and never lose who we are.
In both Emerson’s quote, and our modern understanding, authenticity seems to go hand in hand demanding that our faults be accepted. I understand what is desirable about this, but I’ve also seen how destructive it can be. In my own life I’ve had people tell me deeply hurtful and unkind things, because they were being “honest and authentic” with me. While I agree that the people in our lives should want to be in our lives regardless of our faults, if we know that something we do hurts someone we care about, surely we want to change. There is something to be said for learning to accept who we are, even with our faults, but I also don’t think that we need to resign ourselves to these faults holding sway over us. Our hopes for who we want to be are just as much a part of us as anything else. Our quest for authenticity shouldn’t limit us to our present day fears or foibles, our aggression or anxiety. We should be able to grow and to change — whether that means changing up our Starbucks order or deciding to put an end to our compulsive shopping habits. Our authenticity should open us to the possibility of all that we can be, especially in how we interact with others.
There is an episode of the sitcom ‘Community,’ which follows the misadventures of a handful of misfits forming in a study group at a community college, that dwells on this notion. In this episode, several members of the study group encourage their friend Abed to get to know a girl on campus. They tell him to ‘just be himself,’ to which he tells them that if he was being himself, he wouldn’t go talk to her. They desperately want to help his love life, and encourage him to find a version of himself that might try to get to know this girl, and over the course of the episode, Abed channels several personas to get to know her. At the end of the episode the study group is crushed to learn that the girl already had a boyfriend, and that they got Abed’s hopes up for nothing, only to learn that Abed is unconcerned. He’d been telling the truth when he said that if he was being himself, he wouldn’t try to get to know her. He changed his behavior to make his friends happy. Abed knew they wanted him to get to know her and how important it was to his friends to feel like they had helped. “When you really know who you are and what you like about yourself,” Abed tells them, in his straightforward way, “changing for others isn't such a big deal.”
While, in my opinion, Abed’s friends definitely shouldn’t have pressured him into getting to know a girl that he had no interest in getting to know, Abed’s words ring true. Sometimes we should put others' needs first. When we do that, we have to put our love of self, our needs, our own authenticity aside. If we truly know ourselves, like Abed says, that shouldn’t be such a big deal. In fact, it gets closer to a deeper truth, the truth that our truest nature is brought out by the people in our lives.
“When you really know who you are and what you like about yourself, changing for others isn’t such a big deal.”
My husband Austin is a beautiful example of this. Austin is a generous soul, loving deeply and accepting of others, regardless of their faults. I’ve never seen him lose his temper or raise his voice, no matter the hurt he experiences, the injustice he feels, or the pressure he’s under – all of which are situations I have seen in. That said, for most of his life this wouldn’t be true. In fact, if you ask him, anger was his default emotion. He struggled with that anger, and the impact that had on the people in his life, for many years. Before we came into each other’s lives, Austin put that default reaction behind him, making the choice to be gentler and kinder on his relationships. Through this transformation, Austin discovered that not only did his relationships improve, but his own internal life. By turning away from his natural affinity for anger, he found a calm that entirely changed how he moved through the world, for the better. From time to time situations arise where that old anger sought to rear its ugly head, and I’ve seen Austin intentionally reject it, setting it aside to let his better angels reign instead. In the way that our modern society and Emerson alike look at authenticity, it would seem that Austin denies himself who he is and what he needs. Yet, if you ask Austin, he’ll tell you that his love for the people in his life helped him find his truest self.
We are not ourselves in vacuum. Instead, we are the culmination of our Spotify playlists, family vacations, group chats, Christmas lists, our genetic code, prayer requests, go-to Five Guys orders, the people that we love, dream jobs, books to be read, credit card statements, birthday parties, fourth-grade secrets spilled at recess, and so much more. So much of who we are is revealed through others, especially through our love and concern for others. True authenticity shouldn’t be only about accepting our faults and weaknesses as a part of us. True authenticity, at least for me, empowers us to face those weaknesses, and accept them, not as reflections of ourselves, in order to rise above them, and allow our best self to shine forth ever the stronger.
At the end of the day, I struggle with the pedestal we place authenticity on. It seems to lock us into who we are in a moment, in our likes and dislikes of that day, in our strengths and weaknesses of that moment. We lose so much by focusing on everything we think we are in the moment; we lose sight of our ability to change and grow and transform, whether thats our personal style, career, or our vices. True authenticity requires us to live into the potential of all we can be, knowing that some days we will triumph over ourselves and some days we won’t, and that’s okay. In truly knowing ourselves, we can allow ourselves to recognize what the people in our life need, and see the possibility of everything we can strive to be reflected back at us through our relationships. And in truly being known, we can find the grace to try and discover all that we can be.
